A Very Bassett Wedding

Penny Wise and Wooton Bassett's wedding is only two days away, but everything has gone wrong at once: Penny's wedding gown has been ruined, the replacement dress she found is on hold for another customer named Alice, Wooton has lost Penny's engagement ring, and Penny herself has been rushed into emergency surgery without being able to reach anyone. Wooton's twin brother Wellington is convinced that Ethel Depris, the little old lady Wooton helped across the street, picked his pocket, declaring that no one gets away with scamming a Bassett.

The brothers track Ethel to the Odyssey Retirement Home, where Wellington lays out a good-cop, bad-cop scheme. Wooton, naturally, gets the good-cop role, since, as Wellington puts it, "Your bad cop would make Snow White look like a mob boss." But the interrogation goes nowhere. Between bingo calls, Ethel cheerfully chats about Pilates and jewelry, seems genuinely sorry to hear about the lost ring, and caps things off by winning a gift certificate for all-you-can-eat yogurt. Wellington remains suspicious, especially when an employee named Bridget mentions that Ethel is secretive about the jewelry she sells and is heading to a convention in Connellsville that very night. Before they can plan their next move, Wooton learns that Penny is in the hospital.

At the hospital, Penny is groggy from anesthesia after surgery on her appendix, which nearly burst. Connie, the wedding coordinator, feels terrible for having told Penny she was just stressed. Wooton refuses to leave Penny's side again, so Wellington recruits Connie and Eugene to go to the convention posing as a couple shopping for a ring - which requires the very married Eugene to reluctantly remove his wedding band. Meanwhile, Penny's parents, Frank and Eleanor Wise, have won the replacement dress from Alice by promising her a fancier gown, a free haircut, an oil change, and a tire rotation.

At booth 27, Ethel offers the undercover "couple" a romantic blue ring she calls a recent acquisition. Just as Eugene reaches for his phone to snap evidence, Whit appears - he has come to give Ethel a ride home, and he vouches for her as the kindest person he knows. The ring turns out to be plastic, priced at a dollar fifty; Ethel proudly makes all her jewelry from melted plastic molded in ketchup-bottle tops. The sleuths feel very silly.

Whit gently asks Wellington whether the ring was ever stolen at all, and Wellington starts to remember that he was the one holding it when they left the jewelry store. Sure enough, he finds the ring in his car, buried in the ice of his glove-compartment cooler, where he dropped it while juggling a phone call and a cold soda. He returns it to Wooton along with a rare, one-time-only apology and admits why he chased the ring so hard: he couldn't stand the thought of anyone taking advantage of his brother. Wooton is delighted, insisting they're like real brothers now, though Wellington refuses to make too much of it.

At the rehearsal the next day, disaster strikes again: Frank accidentally loaded the wedding dress into the trunk of an identical car parked next to theirs, and it is gone. But Penny and Wooton arrive glowing, with news of their own. Midway through Connie's carefully staged run-through, Penny announces, "Wooton and I aren't getting married tomorrow. We're getting married right now!" Rather than risk another day of stress and mishaps, they want to marry surrounded by the friends already gathered. And Whit really can perform the ceremony - as a gift to Penny, Wooton arranged for Whit to be ordained, which was the real reason for Whit's mysterious trip to Connellsville. So with Penny in a saffron-yellow dress, Connie in jeans, and Frank in his tool belt, the couple exchanges vows, and Whit pronounces them "husband and wife for real."

Afterward, Penny reassures her mother, who had hoped a Wise family tradition like purple and gold candles would be part of the day. The true Wise legacy, Penny tells her parents, is the way they have loved, argued, forgiven, and cared for each other for years - the example that made her want to marry Wooton in the first place. As the celebration carries on toward barbecue and pie, teary-eyed Frank finally gets that handkerchief.